Hey, thanks for the pick me up! I'm getting ready to work on a big DW project, and have mostly been thinking how overwhelming it is while reading The Data Warhouse Toolkit. Now I can at least think that I'm much better off than I would have been 12 years ago! There are certainly a lot more resources (like this site and that great book by Inmon!) than there were when you did it.

I have to say it's an exciting time in DW/BI, as there's enough info to make it realistic, but not so much as to make it too easy for your work to be appreaciated.

I remember when I introduced the concept to a corporate finance company I was working at in 2000. It was the first time the company was able to make strategic decisions looking at the company business. It was the company's most profitable year.

I am a DBA who recently finished working on a SQL 2005 DW project. The 1st 6 months almost killed me between working with beta software and trying desperately to get my head around the whole BI world. I believe that BI could be the most exciting area for a DBA to be in. I still stuggle with what the true role of a DBA is in the MS DW model. I did the AS development (cubeville) but in general is there a seperate DBA role or does the DBA assume a new role? Do we administer AS? Do we administer RS? Do we develop the ETL in SSIS? Do we develop in those areas or do DBAs work with the relational store and the data sources and leave the rest to developers? Not sure what the answer is and I imagine it will be quite different for different companies. Thoughts?

I still find myself wondering, occasionally, what the hoopla around data warehousing is. Virtually anybody who works for a company that has been in business long enough to define the word 'mainframe' already HAS a data warehouse. By that I mean data stored away in different formats among different systems that are typically incompatible. Typically, the real problem with these 'warehouses' is not the storage but the picking of data.

The trend seems to be to create yet another warehouse, where data is regularly collected from one warehouse and stored in another (albeit in a fashion more optimized for analytics). This is a financial boon for those who run the warehouse business, but is the value really gained simply by moving the data? Why not a software platform that is vendor agnostic, capable of stitching together data from the various existing systems, using meta data to arrive at consistencies in definitions, and making that data available for reporting without requiring that it be physically moved?

G Bryant McClellan; In a sense you are 100% correct on your assessment with a DW. None the less there are many organizations that don't have something like a very large data repository that allows them to efficiently report on "what-if" scenarios. The framework of a DW with the proper project management design methodology behind it will result in a high performance reliable platform providing good statistics for the "decision makers".

It doesn't take long, after sitting in on a long-winded high-level meeting to find out there is information that is needed to steer a corporation and yet has no way of being tapped.